Psychoanalyze this any way you like, but Nike is offering the German soccer federation a mind-blowing amount of money to persuade the national soccer team to switch from wearing the Adidas brand to sporting the swoosh.

How mind-blowing? Try $777 million over eight years, or $97 million a year.

Now Germany's got a really good team -- it has won three World Cups after all. But it's still lagging Brazil's record of five World Cup wins. And Brazil, which was Nike's much-marketed team of choice for the 2006 World Cup makes $12 million a year under a contract that runs until 2018.

Granted Brazil lost in the quarter finals, while Germany won third-place. But considering Germany is the home country for archrival Adidas (which leads Nike in the soccer business) and that Germany has been an Adidas endorser since 1954, AND that Nike has declared, again, that it plans to No. 1 in soccer, well... we can think of one other thing Nike would get out of buying the team's loyalty: schadenfreude.